Okay okay okay…Even Einstein
was allowed a “biggest blunder” so cut me some slack, alright? On my blog, my
biggest blunder (to date) was using the 1986 overdubbed version of We’re Only
In It For The Money as source material for the patches for my Uncensored Original Mix.I got a lot of flak for it, and I guess
rightfully so.Because certainly a completely
uncensored stereo 1968 version of the album could be made, I just had to try
harder!Zappa fans spoke out against my ignorance,
and so here is my UPGRADE to that.Please
forgive me!

The upgrades to this revision:

- A new edit of “Harry, You’re A Beast” is created,
restoring the censored “Don’t cum in me, in me” verse using original 1968
recordings, NOT the 1986 overdubbed versions.To do this, I re-assembled the entire cut-up verse in correct order,
forward, using the mono master from Lumpy Money Project/Object.I then synced that reassembled mono verse to
the stereo instrumental backing track, creating a full stereo, uncensored verse
for the first time ever (at least to my knowledge - no the acetate demo version is in mono and in subpar quality!)

- a new edit of “Mother People” is created, restoring the censored
“Shut your fucking mouth” verse using original 1968 recordings, NOT the 1986 overdubbed
version.To do this, I took the reversed
version of the verse from “Hot Poop”, swapped the channels to match “Mother People”,
and inserted the verse to its proper place.I then extracted the “Shut you fucking mouth” line from the mono mix
found on Mothermania and restored the uncensored line in place.To keep the stereophonic mixing of uniform, I
panned the entire mono line to the right and added a low-pass-filtered mix of
the line to the left.The result was
surprisingly cohesive and kept with Zappa’s original mixing scheme with the
bass to the left and the drums to the right, with the only discrepancy that the
singular vocal line being single-tracked for a second or two while the rest of
the verse remains double-tracked.

- a new edit of “Hot Poop” is created, restoring the reversed
and censored “Shut your fucking mouth” verse using original 1968
recordings.To do this, I reversed the
above edit I created for “Mother People”, swapped the channels and inserted it
back into the track.

Note that my same edit of “Concentration Moon” is still used
here because, although sourced from the 1986 remaster, there were no 1986 overdubs
featured in the edit itself and it is technically all original 1968 material.

This was a special request a number of months ago, and it
sounded like a fun challenge.This is my
own unique edit of Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only In
It For The Money that utilizes all original 1968 stereo mixes, but reinstates
all the originally censored material, thus creating a completely uncensored
original mix.

Frank Zappa famously said, when accepting an award for his
third album We’re Only In It For The Money, “I prefer that the award be
presented to the guy who modified this record, because what you're hearing is
more reflective of his work than mine.”Although he was exaggerating a bit, it is certainly true that much of
Zappa’s groundbreaking and cutting edge humor was softened or even literally
removed for commercial release.Numerous
pieces of the album were edited to appease late 60s “decency standards”, thus
beginning Zappa’s heavily-championed cause for artist’s Freedom of Speech and
the battle against censorship and the suits who perpetuate it.For decades, fans could only enjoy what the
label thought would appease social standards at the time, rather than what the
artist intended.Luckily throughout the
years, there were a handful of reissues and international repressing of the
album that did reinstate many of the dubious censored pieces.

Currently, all but four specific alterations of the album
had been restored to the original 1968 mix of We’re Only In It For The Money:
the spoken Velvet Underground reference in “Concentration Moon”, the “Don’t cum
in me” verse of “Harry, You’re A Beast”, the “Shut your fucking mouth” verse
of “Mother People” and the reversed version of that same verse in “Hot Poop”.But is there a way to reinstate these sections?Some of those pieces exist on a bootleg of
demos recorded for the album, but only exist in mono at the wrong tape speeds,
and are thus unusable.Maybe there is
another option?

The next chapter of the album’s curious history began with
revolutions in the recording industry, specifically the advent of digital
mastering.In 1986, the album was slated
for a new digital remaster along with the rest of Frank Zappa’s discography.In a move that is almost universally
considered sacrilege by fans, Zappa utilized the remastering process as an
excuse to literally replace the original drum and bass tracks on the album with
a newly recorded rhythm section.Not
only was this new remaster of We’re Only in It For The Money condemned by
purists, but the end result seemed extremely anachronistic with an obviously
1960s guitar, keyboard & vocal sound juxtaposed with an obviously 1980s
drum & bass sound; today in the 2010s, the effect is exacerbated with the
1980s overdubs sounding extremely dated.This version of the album is currently out-of-press, aside from being
included in an exhaustive box set release from this era of The Mothers.

The
only benefit of this horrid 1986 remix/remaster was that three of the
aforementioned censored tracks, “Concentration Moon”, “Harry, You’re A
Beast” and “Mother People”, all contained their original unedited,
uncensored material, albeit with an infuriating re-recorded rhythm
section ("Hot Poop" curiously retained the orignal, untouched reversed
and censored line).What can be a generally painful
listen can also be revelatory in showing Zappa’s original artistic intent… in
regards to the originally censored material, of course.

What I have done here is take the best master available of
the original 1968 stereo mix (which reinstates all the minor censored parts that
were internationally restored via reissues) and replaced the four remaining
censored bits with their uncensored equivalents from a number of source, thus
creating a completely uncensored and completely stereo version of We’re Only In
It for The Money.The spoken Velvet Underground
line in “Concentration Moon” was mixed to mono and panned to 10:00 to match the
original mix; the result sounds completely authentic as there were no 1986
overdubs underneath the edit.The
replaced verses of “Mother People” and “Harry, You’re A Beast” also fit
perfectly, and are for the first time here in full stereo.I even went ahead for extra credit and uncensored
the backwards bit in “Hot Poop” for any anal-retentive listeners out
there!

Other minor technical errors of the source material remaster
were fixed, such as the rejoining of “Telephone Conversation” and “Bow Tie
Daddy” into one track (as Zappa originally intended) and the correction of the
half-second track-split offset that was inherent to this remaster.With this, I hope you enjoy what Zappa originally
intended us to hear, all in stereo.

This is a reconstruction of the proposed double-concept
album originally meant to be The Smashing Pumpkins’ fifth and final proper
studio album in 1999.Originally
conceived as a rock opera, the concept was dropped because of band member
disintegration and disinterest as well as record label pushback.The album was eventually released as the
massive commercial failure MACHINA/The Machines of God in 2000, with most of
the leftover tracks released posthumously by the band without their label’s
consent as MACHINA II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music later than
year.This reconstruction attempts to
cull the best possible sources (including the Machina pre-master and the best
vinyl rip of Machina II), unifying their respective volumes and organize them into a cohesive double album that
follows the Machina storyline.Specific
alternate versions of some tracks were utilized to give the album more of an
organic “live band”-sound as opposed to the overproduced Machina album.

The Smashing Pumpkins were no strangers to turmoil.Firing their drummer Jimmy Chamberlin in 1996
for perpetual drug use, the band made a 180-turn from their patented guitar
sonics that made 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness a landmark double
album to an unusual combination of acoustic and electronic for their follow-up,
1998’s Adore.Despite having superior
songwriting and inventive arrangements, the album was less of a success as
their previous efforts.The tour in
support of the album showed the band re-interpreting the soft-spoken material
for a live rock-band, and the eventual re-hiring of Chamberlin in late 1998
showed promise that The Smashing Pumpkins were back to what they did best: loud
fuzzy guitars pared with some of the best drumming of the decade.

By April 1999, the band reconvened for their Arising Tour,
meant to showcase the return of the original lineup.Most of the set featured all new material,
effortlessly written by head-Pumpkin Billy Corgan within the four months
prior.These tunes were part of a larger
song cycle that would fill two CDs of a double-concept album tentatively called
Glass and The Machines of God which concerned a rock star named Glass , his
true love June, their rise and fall and Glass's redemption.Most notably, the four members of The Smashing Pumpkins were to portray
the characters of the concept album—Glass and his band The Machines of God, who
were literal parodies of the public personas of the four members of The
Smashing Pumpkins themselves —in promotion of the album.

Unfortunately the machine was never switched on.Halfway through recording the album, bass
player D’Arcy Wretzky was dismissed from the band due to alleged erratic
behavior; how could the band portray a convincing parody of themselves without
the key members?The situation worsened
with guitarist James Iha’s increasing ambivalence to the band itself, as well
as a record label unwilling to promote a convoluted double-album follow-up to
the commercial failure Adore.The
solution was to scrap the concept and release the best material as MACHINA/The
Machines of God, much like Lifehouse became Who’s Next 25 years earlier (a
reconstruction also featured on this blog).Machina was even more of a failure than Adore and by the end of the tour
in support of the album, Iha wanted out.The Smashing Pumpkins played their final show that December.In one final rebellious move against the
record label that had abandoned him, Corgan released the outtakes from the
Machina sessions as a limited edition vinyl release, Machina II, with the
explicit instructions to share and pirate it, making the album one of the first
to be freely distributed on the internet by a major artist.

Reconstructing Glass and The Machines of God is no easy
task.Corgan has been extremely vague
and cryptic about how it would have been constructed, in as much as leaking
false numerical codes allegedly forming track sequences.Point of fact, of the 30-or-so songs
recording during the sessions, Corgan has only divulged the narrative context
of “Blue Skies Bring Tears”, “Speed Kills” and “With Every Light”.Luckily Corgan has leaked a blueprint of the
song cycle itself with a list of 17 of the cycle’s songs, all offering varying
ways the songs could fit into the cycle.Using this map, as well as song lyric interpretation matched with the
synopsis of the album’s story written in Corgan’s typical superfluous prose, we
are able to chart out a track sequence.Both Corgan’s chart and his synopsis are included for reference.

The only issue left is what sources should be used.To avoid the terrible mastering found on
Machina I, I used a rip of the leaked pre-master, featuring a larger dynamic
range as well as subtlety different mixes.As for the Machina II tracks I used the best possible source, the Virgin
promo rip.I then re-EQd the entire rip
to match the EQ parameters of the tracks that were officially released (since
those few were sourced from a non-vinyl master).Since we also have a number of alternate versions of many of the songs,
I specifically vied towards the versions of the songs that featured more of an
organic ‘live-band’ and stripped-down arrangement and production, as that was allegedly
how Glass and The Machines of God would have sounded.The bootlegs Machina Acoustic Demos and The Original FEMM Tape were used, they were not the "th13rteen remasters" but original CD rips. Setting a 28-song limit to ensure that this not
become too overblown, a few songs were left on the cutting room floor: “The Age
of Innocence” is excluded from this reconstruction as the song was written and
recorded at the last minute and tagged onto the end of the Machina album, having nothing to do with the song cycle at all; “Slow Dawn”, “Vanity” and “Saturnine”
all seemed too unfinished, skeletal and unneeded to communicate the story; “Soul
Power” was a cover; and “Le Deux Machina” was already an element of “Glass +
The Ghost Children”.By the end, I have
arranged two nearly 60-minute discs of 14 songs each, which seemed to be The
Standard Smashing Pumpkins Album Length.

Disc one beings with Glass establishing his character as a
rather agnostic rock star, leader of The Machines of God, utilizing Corgan’s
acoustic demo of “If There Is A God” which overlaps into the pummeling “Cash
Car Star”; although most reconstructions of this album begin with “Glass
Theme”, I chose this alternate route because this was how the band often
performed the two songs live.It was also
quite reminiscent of the first two tracks from The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1994
b-sides compilation Pisces Iscariot, which always struck me as an extremely
dynamic opening.“The Imploding Voice”
represents ‘The Voice’ of God speaking to Glass through the radio and
instructing him to spread the word of love to the world through his music;
“Wound” is Glass’s reaction to the sudden realization that he is a modern-day
prophet and with “The Sacred + Profane” Glass begins to change the message of
his band’s music with heavenly divination.

The next part of the song cycle involves Glass’s love
interest June and so all of the ‘love songs’ are grouped together—“Stand Inside
Your Love”, “Real Love”, “Innosence” and “Let Me Give The World To You”.Following this, Glass reaches a ‘crossroads’
in trying to balance his hedonistic rock n roll life with June vs. what he
believes as his spiritual duty, articulated in “The Crying Tree of Mercury”,
“White Spyder” (the spyder being a symbol for June’s drug use) and “Raindrops +
Sunshowers.”Following is the standard
Smashing Pumpkins epic 10-mnute track, “Glass + The Ghost Children” in which
the dictaphone middle section now actually makes sense as it specifically deals
with Glass confessing his holy charge to June but fearing he may be instead mad.James Iha’s “Go” has been problematic as it
didn’t seem to fit in with the Machina concept at all, so it is sequenced here
to close disc one, much as his “Take Me Down” closes disc one of Mellon
Collie.Perhaps it is sung from June’s
point of view?

The second disc opens with what Corgan revealed as the ‘live
set’ of the album, in which several songs would be grouped together as a mock
live performance of The Machines of God.Opening with actual audience ambience from a soundboard tape of their
9/20/2000 performance, Glass has grown cynical from his fans’ perceived
betrayal of ‘rock n roll’ in “Glass Theme” and questions if ‘The Voice’ was
even real in “The Everlasting Gaze” as his own band’s record sales plummet.June becomes alienated from Glass and her
resent is stated in “Dross”, following by increased drug use and a withdrawal
inside herself in “In My Body”.After an
explosive fight, June is killed in a car crash as depicted in “Speed Kills”,
using the ‘live-band’ version from Machina 2.Glass blames himself and this sends him over the edge in “Lucky 13”, finally deciding to break up the band in “Heavy Metal Machine”.

The night before the final show, Glass has a terrifying
dream as heard in “Blue Skies Bring Tears”: a vision that without God, love,
fans or even a band, he is now completely alone.Here I chose an early arrangement of the song
as performed on the Arising Tour to avoid the overproduced album versions.Abandoning all belongings, Glass takes to the
streets as a beggar, as depicted in “I of the Mourning”, and “Here’s To The
Atom Bomb” (the mellow version from Machina 2).In being alone and with nothing, he realizes that love, God, etc
was there in his heart all along in “Try, Try, Try” (the mellow version found
onthe "Untitled" promo CD), “Home” and “This Time”.The album closes with “With Every Light”, as Corgan had claimed, some
sort of happy ending.

An interesting side note is that within 6 months to a year from
now, Corgan plans to release a remixed and remastered Machina featuring his originally-intended
double-album tracklist as a part of the remastered series of The Smashing
Pumpkins’ discography.Will it appear
and sound as I have offered here?That
is anyone’s guess, and I am curious to see how close I am to his vision.But keep in mind Billy Corgan’s penchant for
historical revision, as well as the recent fan dissatisfaction with the
remasters’ quality control issues.Whether
this reconstruction is truly what the artist intended, it will always be here
as an 'album that never was' just in case the real deal is crushed underneath Corgan’s own heavy metal
machine.

This is my own unique edit of The Flaming Lips’ epic 24-hour
song, “7 Skies H3”, edited to the length of an ordinary 90-minute double-album.Each of the song’s fourteen movements were
extracted to represent a song on this album that never was; each song was then edited
down to an appropriate length for that particular song in the context of an
album.In effect, some tracks act as
mere transitions to other, while some tracks remained epic in scope (in the
context of an album anyways).My edit is
essentially similar to the band’s own official 50-minute edit released on
limited edition vinyl for Record Store Day in 2014, but is more inclusive as it
is twice the length, allowing for more movements (appearing here as songs) that
could not fit onto one album.All track segues
are intact and this album plays as a continuous 90-minute piece.All official song titles are used, except for
the unnamed movements which will default to the long-held fan-chosen
titles.

By the 2010s, The Flaming Lips have reached a mid-life crisis.They had already made their cherished acid-punk
indie releases in the 1980s; they already had their breakthrough noise-pop hit in
1993 with “She Don’t Use Jelly”; they already made their self-serving experimental
four-disc album, Zaireeka; they had
already made their critically acclaimed symphonic-pop masterpiece The Soft
Bulletin; they had already managed the trick of “selling out” and still retaining
their audience with Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots in 2002; they had already
made a complete musical about-face into dark, hypnotic Krautrock for
Embryonic.If they refuse to break-up,
what does a band who has already done everything do next?The answer: whatever the fuck they want.

This of course meant a series of bizarre EP releases
throughout 2011 which included: a song meant to be played on 12 different cell
phones simultaneously; recordings released on flash drives encased in marijuana-flavored gummy skulls; and a six-hour song released inside a strobe light
toy.While one could perceive this as
pure gimmick, this observer sees it as a result of the combined boredom with
the typical rock band archetype and the realization of ultimate artistic
freedom, something earned after 30 years of making music.But it was that six-hour song, “I Found A
Star On The Ground”, that set a new bar for the band searching for something
interesting to fill their time in 2011: how does one top a 6-hour song?With a 24-hour song, of course!

“7 Skies H3” tells the story of a protagonist whose love
commits suicide, and the listener embarks on a psychedelic journey through his grief
process as well as a musical representation of her afterlife.The song—becoming an insane challenge for
Flaming Lips fans to even listen to it in its entirety—was released to a limited
edition of 13 copies on Halloween 2011, encased in an actual human skull.It was also broadcast as a live webstream,
which continually (and to this day) plays the song indefinitely.While detractors found even more gimmick to
condemn, there was one thing they could not argue: “7 Skies H3”contained some
of the best music The Flaming Lips ever produced.

But how could one even plausibly listen to a 24-song just to
find this brilliance?Aside from the
obviously daring few devoted the time necessary for such an undertaking, there
were also some clever fans much like myself.StrangePets created an excellent 3-hour and 33-miunte edit, a more digestible
experience for any curious listener.He then further
created what he dubbed his MicroMix which condensed the 333 Mix down to 90
minutes, with all song segues similar so that one could custom make a “7 Skies
H3” mix using segments from either of his 333 Mix or MicroMix.Finally, The Flaming Lips themselves released their own take on a condensed “7 Skies H3” as a
50-minute album version released on Record Store Day 2014.Having never bothered with the full 24-hour
version myself, it was those three mixes that inspired me to ask: “What if this
24-hour song was somehow edited down to a 90-minute double-album that never
was?”

My album version of 7 Skies H3 begins with “Can’t Shut Off
My Head”, one of the four lyric-based segments that explains the concept of the
songs themselves.This 10-verse song was
originally over 25-minutes in length; needing something more feasible for album
length, I took a cue from Bob Dylan and edited out half of all the instrumental
breaks (originally appearing after each verse), so that the instrumental breaks
follow every two verses. Following is
what fans called “Calliope Trance with Major and Minor Celestial Sections” but
was officially titled “Meepy Morp” on the RSD version.Originally an hour in length, I have reduced
it down to just over three minutes to keep the album moving.An officially unnamed track “Radiation Wind”,
originally running 37 minutes and not appearing on the RSD version, is reduced
to a two minute interlude before “Battling Voices From Beyond” plummets
in.This movement was originally a
grueling two and a half hours, here reduced to a typical 4-minute song length.The 10-minute and unnamed “Electronic Toy Factory”
(featuring the experimental duo Pitchwafuzz), again absent on the RSD version, is again reduced to a 2-minute
segue into the next track, the second lyrical-based song “In A Dream”.Originally an hour-long, it has been reduced
to 5 minutes, containing four verses, notably the ones with multi-instrumentalist
Seven Drozd’s backing vocals.Creating
the midpoint of my 7 Skies H3 album is my personal favorite “Metamorphosis”.Originally an unfathomable seven hours in
length, this piece had to obviously be trimmed for my album construction.Needing structure for this largely improvisational piece, a 13-minute epic is created
when the opening and closing five minutes of its archetype vamping chord
sequence sandwiches an interlude jam in Bb and Gm.The
conclusion of “Metamorphosis” is the mid-point in the 24-hour song and was originally
meant to conclude the first 45-minute disc of my double album
construction.Unfortunately it did not
work out this way, and the actual midpoint of my album construction is the halfway mark of “Metamorphosis”
itself.In effect, this album
construction doesn’t fit on two discs evenly; I suppose that is fine, since all
songs are meant to be played continuously as one piece anyways!

The third lyric-based song “Requiem” begins this (approximately)
second half, originally 23 minutes in length but here edited down to a more
appropriate 5 minutes.The series of musical
movements which follow are what Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne describes as “the
other side of this long journey through death” and starts with the unnamed but
aptly fan-titled “The Other Side”.Originally
clocking in at over an hour but eventually finding a way onto 2013's The Terror as the outro to "You Lust", I have edited it down to a 3-minute interlude for my album construction.Next is the unnamed and fan-titled “An
Outpouring of Immaculate Light from the Heavens Consumes Your Body”, originally
spanning three and a half hours and completely missing from the RSD release.In
reality, the movement is a loop of the same 26-minute jam in Bb with different
sets of embellishments upon each repeat (with one being played backwards).Here I
created a nearly-ten-minute epic jam, with a segment of the backwards repeat
used as an interlude.Next the officially
titled “Meepy Morp (Reprise)”—also known as the fan-titled “Movement of
Celestial Bodies” is edited down to just over 5 minutes from its actual length
of over two hours.“Riot In My Brain!!”,
another drum-propelled freak-out jam, is reduced to a three and a half minute
length from its relentless hour and a half state.Nearing the end, “7 Skies H3 (Main Theme)”—once
called “Forever Floating” by fans—is reduced from an ominous two hours to a
concise six minutes, structurally utilizing two minutes of the orchestrated intro,
two minutes of the guitar solo and two minutes of the ambient post-rock vocal swells.“Can’t Let It Go” concludes this journey
though death, lyrically and musically reiterating the opening track.Originally running just under nine minutes, a
six minute edit is created by removing various bits of the crescendo; in effect
the build-up is no longer gradual, but immediately apparent and the track is perceived
as more bombastic to end this amazing 90 minutes of music.